Language and Academic Skills Support

The Language and Academic Skills Adviser in Law, Dr Anthony McCosker, provides a range of programs and resources to support academic, professional and English language skills development.

Cohort-based courses and seminars

Language Skills for Studying Law: These workshops cover vocabulary development strategies, some essential grammar, and sentence structure in the context of reading skills, paraphrase and summary writing, and the language of critical analysis

Teamwork: The Language and Academic Skills Adviser provides teamwork workshops for undergraduate Dispute Resolution and Negotiation and Mediation, as well as for the Jessup Moot and ELSA WTO moot teams. Similar workshops are also run for the current JD.

Legal Communication Skills (tutorial program, Fundamentals of the Common Law): This nine week program for graduate students enrolled in Fundamentals of the Common Law offers an innovative model for language and academic skills support integrated with curriculum.

Writing Clinics for postgraduate law: These peer-review based writing workshops support graduate students writing five to ten thousand word research papers.

Facilitated study groups

Study groups are a place to review and discuss subject content, as determined by the needs and interests of the group members. LLB students in 2008 can choose to enroll online in a Study Group that is either facilitated or self-managed. Four facilitators, later year law students, run three groups each of up to eight students. Sessions are one hour, and aim to be a space for guided discussion of subject material, ideas, principles and terminology, as well as study and assessment related skills. The facilitators are trained and mentored by the Language and Academic Skills Adviser in Law.

Individual language and academic skills support

Individual consultations with the Language and Academic Skills Adviser in Law identify students’ language and learning difficulties and provide advice and individual strategies for developing skills in the following areas:

• Academic skills: reading (Law texts, cases, journal articles, complex sentence structure); study techniques and strategies; writing notes; approaches to research; organisation and time management techniques
• Writing skills: clear, critical and analytical writing, persuasive and expository writing, both academic and professional writing styles, with an emphasis on plain English
• Advanced English language development: with an emphasis on individual strategies and personal approaches to developing reading, speaking, listening and writing skills.